Mary Lineberger dipped her paintbrush onto a palette and colored a cheery yellow sun wearing sunglasses. She also drew gray clouds approaching the sun’s rays.
The 10-year-old was one of about 30 fifth-graders at Mountain Avenue Elementary School who worked with watercolors Wednesday to illustrate the water cycle. The assignment was part of their science lesson.
“I’m going to draw mountains to the side and then draw clouds that are going to cover the sun and start precipitation,” Mary said.
Students drew the phases of the water cycle, which included evaporation, condensation and precipitation.
Jimmy Smiley, 10, used blue to paint the ocean. He drew an arrow pointing to the clouds above, away from the water. He wrote the word evaporation next to the arrow.
“Water evaporates to the sky, and the vapor gases turn into clouds and it rains down, into hail, sleet, rain or snow,” Jimmy said. “All this collects and it goes into a runoff and goes to lakes and ponds.”
Learning about the water cycle is part of the science curriculum, teacher Ashley Sparks said. The lesson also incorporated social studies and geography, she added.
In one corner of the classroom, students played the role of forecasters. They worked with an atlas to choose destinations where they would predict the weather conditions.
Ten-year-old Kiandra Zakarian looked at a map of the United States and picked out California and New York.
She wrote the names of the states on her paper. After each state, she jotted down the weather. She accompanied each state with a mini drawing of the water cycle.
“I went to New York in the winter last year, and it snowed,” Kiandra said, adding that she planned to draw a mountain range near an ocean where it rains in California.
Students also did experiments to test their hypotheses about precipitation. They placed a block of ice underneath a heat lamp and covered the ice with a plastic cutout of a cloud. The ice sat on a piece of glass above a makeshift land mass.
“It will likely rain very soon,” 10-year-old Alexandra Reyes wrote. “The ice will melt as a result of the heat lamp. It will precipitate.”
Other students preferred to add an eclectic touch to the water cycle assignment.
Becky Mendoza, 10, picked out vibrant red, pink and orange colors to illustrate the phases of the water cycle.
She drew herself in the middle of the ocean and added blue lines representing the rain.
“I just make up the colors as I go along,” Becky said.
“It’s like the rain is crashing down on me.”
